Trying to Make Hitler Not Look Like a Strategic Fool, Which He Was
You need to see a short screencast video. It is a very good example of just how effective a screencast video can be.
Technically, this is a good video. It was cheap to produce. It is graphically effective. The narration is good.
It is also incomparably wrong.
First, some background.
Hitler was a man who heard voices throughout his adult life. Where did these voices come from? How reliable were they? On one occasion, the voice was quite reliable. It told him, while he was in the trenches, to move. He did. Almost immediately thereafter, a shell hit the spot where he had been standing. John Toland discusses this in his book on Hitler (p. 64).
I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades. Suddenly a voice seemed to be saying to me, "Get up and go over there." It was so clear and insistent that I obeyed mechanically, as if it had been a military order. I rose at once to my feet and walked twenty yards along the trench, carrying my dinner in its tin-can with me. Then I sat down to go on eating, my mind being once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and a deafening report came from the part of the trench I had just left. A stray shell had burst over the group in which I had been sitting, and every member of it was killed.
Second, he was too militarily stupid to recognize that if he invaded Poland in 1939, the British would declare war on Germany. The British government had a defensive alliance with Poland in March 1939. Anyone who starts a war without considering the obvious repercussions is a military fool. That's what Hitler was. He never wanted to go to war with Britain. That was a matter of public record. But he simply dismissed the possibility that Britain would support Poland, just as Britain had agreed to do in March.
Third, there was almost no possibility that he could defeat the British Air Force in the Battle of Britain. This may have been just the stupidity of relying on his drug-addicted flight field marshal, Hermann Göring.
Fourth, he had the British on the run at Dunkirk in May 1940. He did not tell his generals to finish the task. He let the British escape. That lost the war against Great Britain.
Fifth, he invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941: Operation Barbarossa. This was a sneak attack. Germany had an alliance with the Soviet Union, and it was on the basis of that alliance that the two countries carved up Poland. The Soviet army smashed his troops. The war was basically over by December 1941. It was simply a mopping-up operation by the Soviet Union. The producer of this video admitted this in a previous video.
Sixth, he declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 when he had no agreement with Japan to do this.
This video tries to show that Hitler was acting rationally. He was not. The video admits that Hitler was not bound by any agreement to come to the aid of Japan. The Axis Pact was strictly a defensive alliance. Japan had attacked the United States without warning. Basically, Japan imitated Hitler, who had done the same thing on June 22.
It also shows that Hitler by December was bogged down inside Russia, and that he was having to face the fact that his assumption of a fast, overwhelming victory had been in error.
The narrator simply will not put two and two together. Hitler was a strategic fool. He was a strategic fool from start to finish. There was a consistent pattern of utter foolhardiness in his entire career. But the consummate act of foolishness was to start a third front with the United States.
The narrator of this video refuses to face the obvious, namely, that Franklin Roosevelt could not possibly have gone into the war against Germany after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The country was mobilizing to fight Japan at the time Germany declared war on the United States. The public wanted to get even with Japan. There was no possible political way that Roosevelt, apart from the declaration of war by Hitler, could have expanded the war into the Atlantic on the official basis. He never would have gotten Congress to go along with that. He had that opportunity in his call for Congress to declare war on December 8, his "day of infamy" speech. He did not mention Germany. Congress wanted to beat the Japanese on December 8, 1941. To ignore this obvious fact as part of the narrative is a blindness that is appalling. It completely misunderstands American politics, beginning on the afternoon of December 7. In the minds of the American population, the bad guys were the Japanese, not the Germans. Americans did not want to go to war against the Germans until December 11. Hitler made this politically possible.
Hitler was a consummate military fool. There has been no national leader in history to match him in this regard. Yet he had the full support of the vast majority of the German people in late 1941. There is no better example in history of Jesus' phrase, "the blind leading the blind into the ditch."
He tries to argue that Hitler did not underestimate the ability of the United States' population and its industrial capacity to inflict enormous damage on German military forces. Of course he underestimated the United States. He did not take Jesus' warning in Luke 14:28-30 to count the cost before you start a war. He had made that mistake in September 1939. He made that mistake again on June 22, 1941. He kept making this same mistake. He was a slow learner. Actually, he was a non-learner. He was a fool.
Equally unwilling to count the cost was the Japanese military high command. Those fools believed that a sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor would so demoralize the American people that they would settle for a compromise peace with Japan out of discouragement. Six months later, three American aircraft carriers sank the four largest aircraft carriers of Japan, losing only one carrier. That effectively ended the war. After the battle of Midway, it was just a mopping-up operation. The Japanese military did not allow anyone in uniform to admit that the Navy's four largest carriers in the fleet had been sunk at Midway. The Japanese people didn't find out about it until after the surrender in August 1945.
Lesson: count the cost.
Hitler ignored the willingness of the British government to enter the war to defend Poland. He ignored the possibility that the British Air Force would defeat the German Air Force over England. He underestimated the strategic necessity of defeating the British troops at Dunkirk. He underestimated the strength of the Soviet military. He underestimated the strength of American industrial production. He overestimated his own skills. He was, in short, a fool.
The Japanese people and the German people paid a heavy price for having trusted military fools. That should be a lesson for all time. In both cases, it led to an overnight reversal of 2,000 years of military tradition and honor. Both nations today are essentially pacifist. They would not make the necessary sacrifices to become as good as the Italian Army. Yet both of them had been dominant military cultures for two millennia. It took two defeats for the Germans, 1918 and 1945, to come to their senses. It took only one defeat to persuade the Japanese. But they eventually figured it out. Every militaristic society eventually figures it out. Then it ceases to be a militaristic society.
Think "Switzerland." Hitler was not dumb enough to invade Switzerland. He knew there would be no net payoff for a victory. He ran a cost-benefit analysis. This was by far his best military decision. He did not have many of them.
This is a slick video. It shows, once again, that skilled rhetoric and effective graphics don't make something true that is obviously incorrect.